June - September 1998

While my intentions of writing on a monthly basis were good, in practice it hasn't quite worked out as I'd have liked. Nonetheless, here is a summary of the last four months. As it happens, they have (thankfully) been relatively uneventful.

As I recall, June was a pretty good month. I attended the CDI (Cross Dressers International) 'Prom'. It was the first time in in about five years that I really did the 'girl' thing. I got to wear the black velvet dress I bought at the beginning of the year (yeah!) and actually go out as 'Donna'. (Pix can be found here.)

All in all I had a pretty good time, although I felt sort of wierd. Doing the whole 'girl' thing doesn't feel any more right than doing the 'guy' thing does. It is, at best, an act or persona; it's not who I really am inside. While it feels so much closer to how I identify, it goes too far. This doesn't mean it isn't fun to get all done up, but it's too fake in my opinion. Which leads me to the next 'big' happening...

Having never really felt like I fit in anywhere, the crossdressing newsgroups didn't seem like the proper forum for the ideas I'd been expressing. So, I started hanging out in Laura's newsgroup, alt.support.crossliving. There were a bunch of us ambiguously gendered posting there and things got a bit out of hand. So, at Laura's suggestion, I undertook the task of creating a new Usenet newsgroup. On Sept 14, 1998 I posted the newgroup control message to alt.config and did just that.

The new newsgroup:

alt.support.intergendered.

As far as I know, this is not a term in use in the transgender community. I hope to make it one that stick's around. Intergendered means between genders. There are a lot of us who do not gender ourselves as either men or women, but as something in between the two, or as in my case, neither a man nor a woman. We really don't 'fit' in the other transgender groups. This newsgroup is an attempt to create such a space.

It felt really good to do this. There is a sense of power in naming and up to this point, I had no name for who I was. While I regect the whole 'labels' thing in general, they seem to ba a necessary evil, and this was one label which was mine; it wasn't assigned to me by someone else.

So far the newsgroup is doing pretty well and all in all, I'm quite pleased.

Overall, things have been pretty good. The rollercoaster that is my life seems to have slowed down a bit, with things at home being generally better.


And that, me droogs, brings June through September 1998 to a close...



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